Monday, October 13, 2008

Capitalism is dying! Workers of the word, Unite to put it down!

With the resounding bankruptcies of the big banks, collapsing stock markets, scarcity of credit for firms and private individuals, the emergency nationalizations of banks and insurance companies is underway in an all-out effort to avert a collapse of the entire international financial system. And now the global recession, having firmly taken root, will deepen, creating genuine panic amongst governments and capitalists worldwide. Serious anxiety will grip the population as a whole, particularly the proletariat. Every worker or salaried employee knows full well that it is he who will foot the bill. The cost of nationalizating the great US, European, and other financial companies, for starters…

The bankruptcy of capitalism is irreversible

Governments, politicians, the media and other hucksters of the bourgeoisie would have us believe that this crisis is due to the irresponsibility of bad traders who played with fire at the stockmarkets. Nonsense! Immorality of predatory financiers… Lies! Madness in the real-estate sector with its "sub-primes"… Nothing but lies! Deregulation of the market… They just can’t stop! It would suffice, they say, to ‘moralize’ finance capitalism and to impose stricter rules to avoid this catastrophe. Every time, at each new crisis, they spout the same hot air: ‘capitalism isn't responsible, only its excesses’.

But nobody explains why capital prefers to invest in speculation rather than the sectors of production. It’s simple, however: the profits from investment in productive sectors are too low. And they are too low because the world market cannot absorb all the goods that the productive forces can create. Capitalism has long developed through the exploitation of the working class in every country, a capacity of productive forces such that it can't find the commercial outlets for all the goods produced. This is the historical contradiction in capitalism: a surplus of goods while billions of human beings live in poverty, unable to afford the immense mass of goods produced. This reveals the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, and the present terrible crisis is only its expression.

We pay for capitalism's plunge into massive and generalized debt !

One of the means capitalism has used for ages to overcome the overproduction of goods is to artificially create a market through massive and generalized debt, primarily that of the State. But even if this delays the outbreak of the disease, the remedy can only exacerbate it. The capitalist world today is faced with a mountain of debt that nobody – and above all neither the State nor the ruling class – will ever repay… and that the international proletariat will have to pay with its sweat and blood. Like the nationalizations of bankrupted banks, the burden of the massive injection of "liquidy" to the central banks to avoid the credit crunch - and thus the paralysis of the economy - and the creation of "bail-out packages" to rescue banks will be borne by the working class, demanding sacrifice, misery, further exploitation, unemployment and repression.

But just as with the generalized debt, this won't suffice. Faced with bankruptcy and lack of solvent markets – even if, today, at the end of 2008, the world’s bourgeoisie, in a panic at the prospect of a generalized collapse, temporarily buries its rivalries in order to come up with a global response – the economic and commercial competition, already acute, tomorrow will become even more savage and brutal; beginning with the capitalist States – expressions of each national capital and main defenders of its interests. Besides increased exploitation of the working class everywhere, all of this can only lead to commercialy and economicaly exacerbated rivalries, transforming them into political, military and imperialist rivalries in which the main capitalist powers of the world play the primary roles, one against the other.

We pay for capitalism's rush to a new world war !

Have no illusions! There are no possible reforms, much less any solution in today’s capitalism. There is but one outcome to the economic crisis and to the ultimate global bankruptcy it represents: mass destruction and the vast slaughterhouse of world war. This is precisely what this system has proven twice in the 20th century. The 1929 crisis – to which all economists and others refer today with horror in describing the extent of the present crisis – led to WWII. This is how it occurred with the economic difficulties – expressed in the 1907 financial crisis – at the turn of the 20th century which plunged the capitalist world into WWI. Already, the violent international recession currently unfolding, can only further exacerbate imperialist rivalries between the great powers. The local wars multiply on all international fronts, increasingly bringing the main imperialist powers into direct confrontation, as the war between Russia and Georgia has just shown. Far from slowing down, this conflict, which had the Russian and the US navies facing off in the Black Sea, has consequently seen the accelerated installation of military systems all over the world, particularly in Europe. Everyone can see this: preparations for military confrontations between the main imperialist powers of the planet is clearly underway.

Have no illusions! Capitalism must be brought down and a new society without classes must be set up!

Have no illusions! Bankrupted capitalism is preparing for decisive, massive, brutal and bloody confrontations against the international working class in order to impose complete and total submission. For only the international proletariat – the main productive class, the wage class – poses any obstacle to the ruling class in its march towards generalized war. It, alone, can really fight to destroy capitalism, save humanity and to set up a new society without classes, thus without exploitation and without war.

Fighting capitalism? The working class is already engaged through its present struggles and strikes, limited as they are, against capitalist policies of all kinds. The media exerts a genuine censorship on this level, and when it can't deny the reality of these struggles, it misrepresents them. Who today has heard about the general strike in Belgium? Or the general strike in Greece for that matter? And what about the strikes and demonstrations in the car industry in Europe, in Volkswagen, in Renault, etc? Who has heard about the strike of the Boeing workers in the United-States? And how many others on every continent?

These struggles, though often still inadequate to repell the bourgeoisie's immediate attacks, demonstrate the working class refusal to subordinate its interests to those of the exploiting class, indicating that it's not ready to accept new and even more serious and brutal sacrifices: massive unemployment, drastic cuts in wages, social benefits, pensions – all generally intolerable policies that the bourgeoisie, facing recession, has already begun to impose. And, much less, accept the ultimate sacrifice of life in a generalized war.

Destroying capitalism? It is in these current struggles, their development, dissemination and in their unification that the international proletariat develops its determination and confidence in its ability to struggle, to resist. It's in these struggles that it develops above all its experience and its consciousness, and thus its capacity to destroy capitalism and set up another society, exempt from war, hunger and misery, without classes or exploitation. It is also within the capacity of today’s genuine communist groups – weak, dispersed, and isolated as they are – to intervene in these struggles in a decisive and resolute manner, putting forth clear political perspectives, for this working class struggle to be fully realized. And it's in the capacity of these political minorities to unite and constitute a genuine world Communist Party that the international proletariat could truly and effectively appropriate the program of the Revolution, the Communist Program.

We must do away with illusions: with capitalism's bankruptcy, the hour of massive frontal confrontations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is upon us. This is a rendez-vous that the latter can not afford to miss. The fate of humanity depends upon it.

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